Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/210

200 globe and the other. (He himself had been born at the wrong end of a fashionable street, he once said in a political speech.) But he was also fully aware that his client might live in the very heart of the Back Bay and barriers more forbidding than space would prevent her from ever crossing its thresholds.

Stella moved into her five-roomed furnished apartment just before Christmas. She still possessed some of the old knack in copying department-store window effects. But it had been a long time since she had had "her eye out for that sort of thing." With no one to guide her, and the matter of expense a constant argument for the cheaper article, her results were not successful. As Laurel gazed upon the slowly growing tawdriness of the apartment, the joy she thought she would feel in inviting the vague new friends her mother told her she would make in her new environment, once they got settled, began to fade.

The living-room was furnished in Mission of the Roycroft Style—big oak chairs with leather cushions; a rectangular couch, leather-cushioned also; a table that was strong enough to be used for a carpenter's bench. And all in spite of the fact of a two-toned light-green, satin-finished wall-paper of the 1890 "parlor period," and an ivory-tinted mantel, which, mongrel though it was, showed more strain of Adam than of Elbert Hubbard.

Stella put yellow-flowered cretonne at the windows. She told Laurel that she had seen a colored picture of a Mission room, in a magazine with yellow-flowered cretonne for hangings, and it was perfectly stunning! She knew where she could get some